This week I bought a new 500GB hard drive for my Macbook and experienced how easy and quick it is to clone your old smaller hard drive into what is a gigantic hard drive for a laptop in an incredibly short amount of time. The HUGE difference between Macs and Windows machines is the concept of cloning. While Windows does not allow you to clone itself Mac does just that. And cloning means tremendous savings in both time and money. It means new hardware with all your stuff already in it. It is interestingly that the company that makes it so hard to clone an iPod makes it so easy to clone a Mac.

To change my hard drive all I did is buy a new one for only $110 in Amazon enclosed it and cloned it using a free program called Super Duper. I then replace the hard disk opening the compartment that seats behind the battery using a special mini screw driver that came with the hard drive. True, there are cloning tools for Windows too, but on Mac it’s just super easy to change, both the hardware and the software. I used Microsoft from 20 years and changed to Apple two years ago. During all my time with Microsoft I thought that Apple was better but harder. Now I see that Apple is better because it is easier, much easier. Microsoft made me feel like an idiot. Apple makes me feel smart. I still don´t know if I am smart or an idiot overall but I certainly prefer the Apple feeling.

And what really puts Mac on another level of simplicity is what happens when you buy a new laptop. On Windows you need to install all your applications and manually recover your documents from your backups, while loosing most of your settings and preferences. On Mac, thanks to its UNIX style “everything is a file” approach, migrating your documents, applications and application settings is as easy as copying your files from your backup to your new computer. With Leopard it’s now even easier: as soon as you boot up your new Mac, Apple’s Migration Assistant lets you copy all your files from your old computer (over WiFi or ethernet) or from a backup. And if you want to go insane with memory here´s a hack that will give you a Tera Macbook.